Through the Mud and Into the Light

In The Shawshank Redemption, there is a scene that makes audiences hold their breath every time. Andy Dufresne, wrongly imprisoned for nearly two decades, finally escapes through a tunnel he has carved inch by inch with nothing more than a tiny rock hammer. But the tunnel leads to a sewage pipe — five hundred yards of the foulest darkness imaginable. Andy crawls through it anyway. When he emerges on the other side, he stands in a creek bed with rain pouring down on his face, arms outstretched, a free man at last.

What strikes me is not the moment of freedom. It is the twenty years of chipping away at that wall, night after night, hiding the evidence each morning. It is the willingness to crawl through filth because he believed something better waited on the other side.

The writer of Hebrews understood this kind of perseverance: "Let us run with endurance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus" (Hebrews 12:1-2). Faith does not spare us the crawl through darkness. It does not hand us a shortcut around suffering. But it gives us something Andy Dufresne had in that prison cell — an unshakeable conviction that this is not the end of the story.

Whatever tunnel you are crawling through today, keep moving. The rain is waiting on the other side.